Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground

The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: Someone - some brilliant, audacious crook - had just staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the U.S. economy. The FBI rushed to launch an ambitious undercover operation aimed at tracking down this new kingpin. Other agencies around the world deployed dozens of moles and double agents.

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet

In this disquieting cyber thriller, Joseph Menn takes readers into the murky hacker underground, traveling the globe from San Francisco to Costa Rica and London to Russia. His guides are California surfer and computer whiz Barrett Lyon and a fearless British high-tech agent. Through these heroes, Menn shows the evolution of cyber-crime from small-time thieving to sophisticated, organized gangs, who began by attacking corporate websites but increasingly steal financial data from consumers.

The Little Black Book of Innovation: How It Works, How to Do It

Innovation may be the hottest discipline around today - in business circles and beyond. And for good reason. Innovation transforms companies and markets. It’s the key to solving vexing social problems. And it makes or breaks professional careers. For all the enthusiasm the topic inspires, however, the practice of innovation remains stubbornly impenetrable. No longer. In The Little Black Book of Innovation, long-time innovation expert Scott D.

Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

In July 1995, San Jose Mercury-News reporter Gary Webb found the Big One - the blockbuster story every journalist secretly dreams about - without even looking for it. A simple phone call concerning an unexceptional pending drug trial turned into a massive conspiracy involving the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, L.A. and Bay Area crack cocaine dealers, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Theory of Evolution: A History of Controversy

Charles Darwin's theory of organic evolution-the idea that life on earth is the product of purely natural causes, not the hand of God-set off shock waves that continue to reverberate through Western society, and especially the United States. What makes evolution such a profoundly provocative concept, so convincing to most scientists, yet so socially and politically divisive? These 12 eye-opening lectures are an examination of the varied elements that so often make this science the object of strong sentiments and heated debate.

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

Top cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter tells the story behind the virus that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear efforts and shows how its existence has ushered in a new age of warfare - one in which a digital attack can have the same destructive capability as a megaton bomb.

Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus 'Notch' Persson and the Game that Changed Everything

Three years ago, 32-year-old Markus "Notch" Persson of Stockholm was an unknown and bored computer programmer. Today, he is a multi-millionaire international icon. Minecraft, the "virtual Lego" game Markus crafted in his free time, has become one of the most talked about activities since Tetris. Talked about by tens of millions of people, in fact.It is the story of unlikely success, fast money, and the power of digital technology to rattle an empire. And it is about creation, exclusion, and the feeling of not fitting in.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers. Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe.

The Real Purpose of Parenting: The Book You Wish Your Parents Read

The Real Purpose of Parenting is a series of stories and life lessons from the world of a therapist, known as The Parent Coach. Very well-intentioned, well meaning parents are at the point of crisis with their kids because their own best parenting efforts are NOT producing the children they want them to be. And there, according to Dr. Phil Dembo, lies the problem. Dr. Dembo shows simple family “turn around” strategies that reframe the real purpose of parenting and gives each family, and child, their own salvation.

Smart Thinking: Three Essential Keys to Solve Problems, Innovate, and Get Things Done

Think smart people are just born that way? Think again. Drawing on diverse studies of the mind, from psychology to linguistics, philosophy, and learning science, Art Markman, Ph.D., demonstrates the difference between "smart thinking" and raw intelligence, showing listeners how memory works, how to learn effectively, and how to use knowledge to get things done. He then introduces his own three-part formula for listeners to employ "smart thinking" in their daily lives.

The Spy's Son: The True Story of the Highest-Ranking CIA Officer Ever Convicted of Espionage and the Son He Trained to Spy for Russia

Jim Nicholson was one of the CIA's top veteran case officers. By day he taught spycraft at the CIA's clandestine training center, The Farm. By night he was a minivan-driving single father racing home to have dinner with his kids. But Nicholson led a double life. For more than two years, he had met covertly with agents of Russia's foreign intelligence service and turned over troves of classified documents. In 1997 Nicholson became the highest-ranking CIA officer ever convicted of espionage.

The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

This is the first volume in a bold new series that tells the stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the Middle East to the far coast of China, while still giving weight to the characteristics of each country. Susan Wise Bauer provides both sweeping scope and vivid attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract assertions about human history. This narrative history employs the methods of "history from beneath" - literature, epic traditions, private letters, and accounts - to connect kings and leaders with the lives of those they ruled.

Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime - from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door

In Spam Nation, investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs unmasks the criminal masterminds driving some of the biggest spam and hacker operations targeting Americans and their bank accounts. Tracing the rise, fall, and alarming resurrection of the digital mafia behind the two largest spam pharmacies - and countless viruses, phishing, and spyware attacks - he delivers the first definitive narrative of the global spam problem and its threat to consumers everywhere.

Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen

David Novak learned long ago that you can't lead a great organization of any size without getting your people aligned, enthusiastic, and focused relentlessly on the mission. But how do you do that? There are countless leadership books, but how many will actually help a Taco Bell shift manager, a Fortune 500 CEO, a new entrepreneur, or anyone in between? Over his 15 years at Yum! Brands, Novak has developed a trademarked program he calls Taking People with You.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth - and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination

For decades, government pundits have dismissed these "coincidental" deaths, even regarding them as "myths" as "urban legends." Like most people, Richard and David were initially unsure about what to make of these 'coincidences'. After all, events don't "consult the odds" prior to happening; they simply happen. Then someone comes along later and figures out what the odds of it happening were. Some of the deaths seemed purely coincidental; heart attacks, hunting accidents.

Detroit: An American Autopsy

In the heart of America, a metropolis is quietly destroying itself. Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age - mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs - Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation that only a native son can possess, journalist Charlie LeDuff sets out to uncover what has brought low this once-vibrant city, his city.

Endgame: The End of The Debt Supercycle And How It Changes Everything

Hundreds of books have been written about the financial crisis that engulfed the world after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. But what if the bigger financial crisis is ahead of us, not behind us?As John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper deftly illustrate in this controversial audio book, the crisis was more than a half-century in the making. The Great Financial Crisis, however, was merely Act I.

Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception

People - friends, family members, work colleagues, salespeople - lie to us all the time. Daily, hourly, constantly. None of us is immune, and all of us are victims. According to studies by several different researchers, most of us encounter nearly 200 lies a day. Now there’s something we can do about it. Liespotting links three disciplines - facial recognition training, interrogation training, and a comprehensive survey of research in the field - into a specialized body of information developed specifically to help business leaders detect deception....

The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden

From Mark Bowden, internationally best-selling and acclaimed author of Black Hawk Down and the preeminent chronicler of the actions of our military and special forces writing today, comes an intensely gripping account of the hunt for and elimination of Osama bin Laden. With unprecedented access to key sources and his great gift for storytelling, Bowden takes us inside the rooms where decisions were made and on the ground where the action unfolded.

Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

This is the dramatic story of the American bomber boys in World War II who brought the war to Hitler’s doorstep. With the narrative power of fiction, this is a harrowing ride through the fire-filled skies over Berlin, Hanover, and Dresden. Fighting at twenty-five thousand feet in thin, freezing air no warriors had encountered before, bomber crews battled new kinds of assaults on body and mind. Air combat was deadly but intermittent: periods of inactivity and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fire and fear.

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

In late 2010, thousands of hacktivists joined a mass digital assault by Anonymous on the websites of VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal to protest their treatment of WikiLeaks. Splinter groups then infiltrated the networks of totalitarian governments in Libya and Tunisia, and an elite team of six people calling themselves LulzSec attacked the FBI, CIA, and Sony. They were flippant and taunting, grabbed headlines, and amassed more than a quarter of a million Twitter followers.

That the average adult spends 50 to 70 percent of their day sitting is no surprise to anyone who works in an office environment. But few realize the health consequences they are suffering as a result of modernity's increasingly sedentary lifestyle, or the effects it has had on society at large. In Get Up!, health expert James A. Levine's original scientific research shows that today's chair-based world, where we no longer use our bodies as they evolved to be used, is having negativeconsequences on our health.

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Based on four years of intensive primary document research, Lawrence in Arabiadefinitively overturns received wisdom on how the modern Middle East was formed. Sweeping in its action, keen in its portraiture, acid in its condemnation of the destruction wrought by European colonial plots, this is a book that brilliantly captures the way in which the folly of the past creates the anguish of the present.

Publisher's Summary

Worm: The First Digital World War tells the story of the Conficker worm, a potentially devastating piece of malware that has baffled experts and infected more than twelve million computers worldwide. When Conficker was unleashed in November 2008, cybersecurity experts did not know what to make of it. Exploiting security flaws in Microsoft Windows, it grew at an astonishingly rapid rate, infecting millions of computers around the world within weeks. Once the worm infiltrated one system it was able to link it with others to form a single network under illicit outside control known as a “botnet.” This botnet was soon capable of overpowering any of the vital computer networks that control banking, telephones, energy flow, air traffic, health-care information — even the Internet itself. Was it a platform for criminal profit or a weapon controlled by a foreign power or dissident organization?

Surprisingly, the U.S. government was only vaguely aware of the threat that Conficker posed, and the task of mounting resistance to the worm fell to a disparate but gifted group of geeks, Internet entrepreneurs, and computer programmers. But when Conficker’s controllers became aware that their creation was encountering resistance, they began refining the worm’s code to make it more difficult to trace and more powerful, testing the Cabal lock’s unity and resolve. Will the Cabal lock down the worm before it is too late? Game on.

I thought this might be too technical for me but I love messing around with my computer so took the plunge. It's the best unsolved "whodunnit" ever. I could NOT put the book down. Talk about gripping your seat and holding your breath...and to think that 'thing' is still out there ready to pounce.

The story is great, and the narration is perfect. I even chuckled from time to time. This will appeal to people at all levels of technical expertise and all age groups. I am 75 years old and loved it.

Well written and at times gripping account of a team of good-guy techies trying to defend the internet from a fast spreading virus whose dangers are unknown.<br/><br/>I am listening to a series of books on computer viruses/malware and I read in a review that this book was a good primer on the subject. I agree. Informative and enjoyable listen.<br/><br/>Solid, classy narration by Christopher Lane.<br/><br/>Next up for me, Countdown to Zero Day, then Kingpin. Yay for techie books!

As a fan of Mark Bowden's work, particularly Black Hawk Down, I was looking forward to his tackling of a subject as technical as computer viruses. As a professional software engineer myself, I think he did an excellent job of conveying technical descriptions very accurately while ensuring accessibility to a non-tech audience. Many of his analogies reminded me of similar chestnuts from my own College education, almost as if Bowden was himself very much an industry insider.

Having said that, I'm struggling to understand why Bowden chose the Conficker worm as his subject, as it was not exactly the finest hour of either the "black hats" (hackers) or the "white hats" (anti-virus community), nor was it even close to a "digital world war". It's more the story of floundering efforts on both sides, neither ever really getting on top of the other, which Bowden attempts to link with the similar fate of modern wars to degenerate into stalemates and "exit strategies", as if that is the only outcome we could hope for, an argument which, although insightful, I didn't find ultimately convincing.

There were a lot of mis-steps on both sides of the worm, and unfortunately there was not all that much "genius" on display when it mattered, despite all the self-glorifying hype from both the black hat and white hat communities. If these white hats are really the guys "securing the Internet", they need to spend less time casting themselves as a Cabal of X-Men and more time, well, securing the Internet. If buying up a gazillion domain names on their own credit cards was the best they could come up with to combat Conficker (hardly a breakthrough of technical wizadry), then I'm afraid they fall rather short of "genius" or X-Men. Their personal quarrels on chat-lists, many recounted in full by Bowden, are particularly uninspiring outbursts of immaturity from apparently brilliant software professionals.

Maybe Bowden just loves the story of good guys plunged into chaos (somewhat of their own making) to see how they deal with the fall-out. That might explain his choosing of the Conficker worm as his subject. Unfortunately, as a subject, it is a rather dull one. Bowden writes well, but the story ultimately just isn't a very interesting one. If you are non-tech, you will learn a great deal about Internet technology from this book, but don't expect an exciting "digital world war" to be exposed, despite what the title claims.

The narration was good, and the writing was good. It just wasn't the best story, overall.

I thought this might be too technical for me but I love messing around with my computer so took the plunge. It's the best unsolved "whodunnit" ever. I could NOT put the book down. Talk about gripping your seat and holding your breath...and to think that 'thing' is still out there ready to pounce.

The story is great, and the narration is perfect. I even chuckled from time to time. This will appeal to people at all levels of technical expertise and all age groups. I am 75 years old and loved it.